From the London Free Press (lfpress.ca)
Mon, September 14, 2009
PHILIP AZIZ, 1922-2009
Renowned London artist Philip Aziz, who achieved international acclaim yet remained in the Forest City, has died.
Credited with starting art education at the University of Western Ontario, Aziz’s works — from paintings and sculptures, to graphics and ornate objects — are found in private collections around the world and in the most public of spaces — from the London International Airport, to the Vatican.
Aziz died yesterday in London after a long battle with cancer. He was 86.
Reaction from family and friends wasn’t immediately available at press time, but few in London’s art world ever had anything but praise for Aziz.
“When he was giving lectures here in the 1940s, I guess the attendance was amazing,” Catherine Elliot Shaw, then curator of the McIntosh Gallery at UWO, said in an early 1990s interview. “There was standing room only. He really is quite entertaining.”
A graduate of Yale and Harvard, Aziz got an early start in the art world by painting portraits sold to well-heeled clients whom he was introduced to by an artist relative who found a market in the same high-end niche for her custom jewelry.
An artist who made his own paint, Aziz didn’t just do portraits but tackled a wide range of subjects — from nature studies, to religious tableaux, philosophical allegories, formal abstracts and free-form improvisations.
As a jeweler, he produced chalices, censers, crosses and ciboria. An architectural designer, he oversaw the creation of houses and chapels.
Aziz was hired in the late 1940s by UWO to give the first art history lectures at the school’s University College, and at the then-new McIntosh Gallery. He remained living in London the entire time, in a home overlooking the Medway Creek, going on to achieve important portrait commissions and other work.
In 1958, at 34, he became the first Canadian elected to the International Institute of Arts a Letters, joining such august company as artists Marc Chagall, Thornton Wilder, William Saroyan and Jean Cocteau.
“He certainly had a real passion for sharing that part of his talent with anyone that he knew,” London Mayor Anne Marie DeCicco-Best said late last night. Aziz, she said, will always be remembered for his contribution to arts and culture.
